Automated Cloud Backup – I’m Testing CrashPlan For Photographers

This post is part of my regular Gear Check series where we explore the items in my camera bag and gear closet. Subscribe to my newsletter (weekly digest or monthly highlights) to make sure you don't miss any of them! You can also find a list of all my gear in my gear guide.

I’m forever tweaking my backup routine to suit my evolving business, and refine my workflow. For a long time I have ignored cloud backup services like BackBlaze and CrashPlan because I wasn’t sure if my glacial Canadian upload speeds would work well for something like that.

CrashPlan For Photographers

Recently I was having a re-think about this though, and since I’ve received so many questions about these kinds of services in the past, I decided to give it a try. Given that a year’s subscription to CrashPlan for unlimited uploads is only $59.99, it’s not the end of the world if I find little use for it and at least I can do some real-world testing.

I asked some questions about services like this to my Facebook followers and we had a wonderfully insightful conversation (you really should follow my Facebook page by the way…). What it showed me is that there is a slight misunderstanding between cloud backup services and what I might call “cloud file sharing” services.

In the former group we have products like Backblaze, CrashPlan and Carbonite. These services are for making backups of your files for emergencies. They are NOT designed for constant cloud access to the files. You can download the files if you’ve had some kind of emergency, but in no way are the interfaces designed for you to be constantly pulling files from the backups for daily usage. The files in the cloud are simply a mirror of the files on your computer. On the other had, the second group of “cloud file sharing” services like iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive, allow you to store files on them that are not even on your computer, and you can share those files with other people and access them all day long from a variety of interfaces.

These are VERY different kinds of services. So please keep this in mind! Cloud backup services are usually unlimited in size, and only cost about $50 or $60 per year, which is much cheaper than most cloud sharing services too.

CrashPlan Vs. Backblaze

All the research I did suggested these were the two best cloud backup services. Backblaze offers a very set-it-and-forget-it product. You literally just install it and turn it on – that’s it. With CrashPlan, you get much more granular control over a few important things:

You can limit the bandwidth being used by the backups

You can limit the times at which the backups are performed

You can specify which folders and external hard drives are backed up

You can limit the percentage of the computer’s CPU that gets used for backing up

For me, as someone that makes use of my computer professionally, these are all very important things, so CrashPlan was a clear choice for me. I set it to only run the backup uploads between 1am and 8am for example, so I know it won’t get in the way of any of the work I might be doing. For now, I’ve also set it to exclude my 12TB of photos in the main archive, because I’m not yet sure if I’ll use something like this for offsite photo protection.

If you are just a hobbyist photographer, it’s very probable that Backblaze will be a better option for you. It’s a much simpler service to set up, but if you’re like me and you like to really dig into settings and optimize things, you’ll appreciate what CrashPlan has to offer. The price difference between the two is negligible.

Why Use It?

In my office I have Time Machine running to make backups of my computer files, but these are only locally stored. If there was a fire or theft, I might lose my Time Machine as well. Currently my offsite backup is only a mirror of my photo archive, so there was definitely a small gap in my backup solution that can be filled by CrashPlan. For only $59.99 a year, it’s worth doing just so that I don’t have to think about other solutions too much. All my important files on my computer are also synced to Google Drive, so I was never worried about losing important documents, but this solution adds another layer of protection, and frankly I hadn’t appreciated quite how cheap these solutions were. It seems like a real bargain to me!

Currently the CrashPlan helper app is telling me that my initial upload will be completed in about 5 days, and I’ll keep you guys updated on how it goes. So far, I’m very impressed, and please note that I am not an affiliate for CrashPlan in any way. I make no $ if you decide to try it too, and they haven’t paid me to do this. I’m simply passing on the results and opinions from my own experimentations to help you guys make an informed decision.

About The Author

Founder of Shutter Muse, full time photographer and creative educator. Dan lives in Whistler, BC, Canada but his wanderlust often sends him in search of images all around the world to meet the needs of clients and readers alike.

14 Comments

I agree that CrashPlan has more features (for me) but some of the granular control you mention is in BackBlaze. CP also allows (from memory) backup forever but BB has some limits on what they will retain and for how long. I would have gone for CP but a major requirement for me was being able to have my backup sent to me on a hard drive if I needed it. They don’t do that in Australia only for the US and our download speeds are 3rd world in Aus.

So far so good for me and backblaze, the peace of mind is worth every penny. Still yet to test the recovery procedure and see if everything I want is actually there. Also, I got burnt in my initial setup as I opened the upload throttle and blew all my bandwidth allocation from my ISP. Doh!

That’s a good point… I’ve been meaning to check with my ISP as to what my monthly allocation is. Now that I’ve discovered how cheap both Backblaze and Crashplan are, I do think it’s a no-brainer to run something like this though!

The main issue on crash plan is when you have to restore 3tb of files and the maximum speed you can get is 2.3mbps…. There are loads of people complaining about this. Some get better speeds using linux. For the crash plan user support anything above 1mbps is good enough.

Hmm, Dan i think you didn’t look good enough at backblaze. I can set a schedule when it’s allowed to backup, what folders and even file types if needed to exclude. Tested both crashplan and backblaze 2 years ago and the backup speed for me with backblaze was so much higher. If needed i can backup something like 10-20gb an hour to backblaze. Restore speed was also better for me although backblaze has a strict control on external disks when they need to be connected (every 30 days) it works very well for me. Just like you also say don’t put everything on one method with your backups

I know 4 people who have at some point in the last few years had or are having issues with the Java applet Crashplan runs, saying it can eat up RAM and have occasional other issues like app slowness or even slowing down the PC/Mac. I didn’t want to play with that, and for security reasons I removed Java from my computer years ago (and only have it embedded in the Chrome browser, which keeps it sandboxed and secure.)

Backblaze had a special last Black Friday where I got two years for $47.50, then a few months later I got an extra free month or two (can’t remember) during a special referral offer. I am very happy with the transparent nature of the backup (which takes up no RAM and which I barely notice when uploading). Note: I haven’t needed to use it yet so I can’t tell you how well it works on restore. As of today Backblaze has backed up 395,316 files / 637,517 MB of my data.

I heard bad stuff about Crashplan, on a lot of forums. I use Google Drive, and I back them on external drive as well and I find it to be the safest, and I cannot afford to pay for unlimited storage so I use this trick: http://www.winzip.com/win/en/features/cloud-backup.html to store more stuff and save on space.

If you set yourself up with a Google Apps account it’s $10/month for unlimited Google Drive space. I used to use that, but switched to Dropbox recently after having a TON of issues with Google Drive. That’s the thing about data and drives… people mostly write about them when things go wrong so the internet is skewed. You’ll find a ton of bad things about every single cloud service and every single hard drive.

Having used and troubleshot Crashplan extensively for the last 18 months I have one word for anyone considering signing up: DON’T.

(A) The financial consequences of using Crashplan for this period have been significant. I’ve yet to work out the precise costs to me but at least £800 – and possibly £1,500. (B) They don’t allow you to seed the initial backup with a hard disk (which Backblaze does). (C) Crashplan is SLOW. I mean REALLY slow! (And it’s almost certainly not your broadband provider). (D) My experience with Crashplan / Code 42’s approach to support is that it’s ABYSMAL! The online ‘Chat’ takes you round in circles, failing to understand (or ignoring) the problem by hiding behind the chat app until you give up. Whether this is deliberate or through ineptitude is hard to say. Ditto email, which they took forever to answer then dragged out never answering the question, sending PDF’s I’d already told them I’d read on several occasions in some cases, refusing to answer questions directly and blaming every possible party other than themselves and their software.

All that ‘granular control’ seems like a nice idea. but it’s meaningless if you’re struggling for MONTHS to get an initial backup done – and you’ve already allocated full bandwidth, memory and CPU to the task.

Nor does it really matter how fast your line is, the upload will still be slow, even on a brand new high-spec Mac. It took months to get to the bottom of my problem – months of tedious exchanges during which Code 42 persisted in asserting that slow upload speeds were due not to Crashplan, but to be blamed (variously) upon –

1. My broadband provider, for capping my (un-capped) uploads. (It wasn’t, and they proved it). 2. Me. I hadn’t set it up correctly. (Although I had set it up precisely according to their instructions, and when they finally looked on my computer they couldn’t fault the config). 3. My location: too far away from the BB provider’s ‘hub’; broadband speed slows the further away you get from the source, so when you live in the middle of nowhere it’s a big problem. (Only I live in the middle of ta big city, yards away from the fibre-optic box from which my supply comes. I bet 99.9% of the UK’s population live miles further away than this). 4. I have too much data. (Interesting. They didn’t think 3Tb was too much data when I signed up to a deal targeting my specific industry, which by definition, tends to generate quite a lot of data). 5. My broadband speed is too slow. (It was 100Mbps down/ 10-15Mbps up! How could that possibly explain why I was only getting 2-3 Mbps up to Crashplan?) 6. Broadband provider is throttling the upload, even though it may be uncapped. (Again, the broadband provider denied this, providing stats, maps and data to prove their point -and given how helpful they were and the evidence provided, I do believe them). However Crashplan persisted in asserting that they do not throttle upload speed, so in desperation… 7. … I finally upgraded broadband to the fastest bandwidth available in the UK at the time, 200Mbps down / 20 Mbps up, UNlimited, UNthrotted, UNbelievably fast – and UNbelievably expensive. And it ultimately made no long-term perceivable difference to Crashplan’s upload speed; it did hit 15Mbps for a few minutes (hooray!) but soon slid back to 7Mbps where it stayed for a while. OK I thought, better than the previous 2-3Mbps. However it soon slowed back down to 2-3Mbps, leaving me stuck with a very expensive contract I get no benefit from. 8. Crashplan’s final suggestion was that I should get a leased line. I kid you not. Make no mistake folks, I’m not running a major corporation here, I’m a one-man-band working from a spare bedroom. I don’t believe a leased line should be necessary for cloud backup – particularly given the lighting-fast speed with which I can send Gigs of data up to other Cloud services such as Dropbox, Microsoft, iCloud or move 2Gb at a time via We Transfer. (NB I’m not confused between backup and file sharing here; I just used these options to compare data transfer speeds).

There had to be another explanation.

Months of on/off research and discussion later, the cause of the problem revealed itself during a phone conversation with Crashplan. I’s true that – technically – Crashplan does not throttle! Just like they said. BUT they finally admitted they DO compress the data locally on your computer before uploading, and that, it would seem, is where the big hold-up is. Six months to upload 3Tb of data. (And don’t even get me started on the tedious business of trying to get 14 days worth of travel photography backed up. Another month. (Good thing I had an alternative disaster recovery strategy as well).

It is interesting to note that in the latest edition of the software they have simply disabled the user’s ability to see the speed of upload. I wonder if this is after receiving so many complaints about upload speed?

Thankfully I have yet to need to download my hard-won backup, but I dread such a day; I’ve since read many a report of disaster recovery going wrong with Crashplan, either data missing or taking months to download again.

Finally there’s the hidden cost to all this – and I don’t just mean the exorbitant £852 p/a (£71 p/m) broadband package I eventually signed up to get the faster bandwidth Crashplan insisted necessary. I’m talking about the wear and tear to my hardware. In order to get that first backup done I had to leave computer and RAID running 24/7 for 6 months. SoftRAID recommends ditching rotating disks after 5,000 hours because after that they become unreliable. If the average working day is 8 hours, a disk should therefore last around 625 days (or 2 years 5 months) before risking unreliability. But when that disk is running for 24 hours, its working life is reduced drastically, to (obviously) ? of its lifespan, a mere 208 days, or 29½ weeks. So I now have 4 expensive hard disks that could need replacing at any moment. Luckily I have SoftRAID monitoring, so I’ll avoid the disaster of data loss, but I won’t avoid the cost of early replacment.

Crashplan has been a stressful and astonishingly expensive failure as far as I’m concerned. I suggest you think carefully before putting yourself and your equipment though a similar experience.

Thanks for the detailed report on your experience. I definitely do find CrashPlan to be slow, and as other are starting to point out, perhaps it’s not the fault of my slow Canadian internet after all! Very interesting!

One thing I want to point out is that Backblaze’s initial drive seeding option is only available for their B2 professional plan, and it costs $550 to set it up. It’s not really a viable solution to overcome the problem, unless you’re a big business because it doesn’t have an app to do auto backups at all. It’s just simple online file storage.

Perhaps I need to look into this a bit more. Thanks again for taking such time to share!

Your email address will not be published or shared. Please note that if you include a link in your comment, it will have to be moderated first before it appears on the site. Required fields are marked*

COMMENT

By submitting a comment this form also collects your name, email and IP address so that we can prevent spam. For more info check our privacy policy.

Name *

Email *

Website

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Don't Miss Out

Join thousands of other photographers who get free photography tips and resources delivered every month.